Still on the road visiting with developers. I have now found my way to Arnhem for the SDC 2005 conference. At the conference we are going to show a technology preview of Delphi support for the .NET Compact Framework. Stay tuned for how registered Delphi 2005 customers can get their hands on the preview compiler.
The picture above shows a screen capture of a Delphi for .NET Windows Forms application compiled for .NET CF and dowloaded to an HP iPAQ rz 1710 Pocket PC 2003 device that I purchased in London last week. I used the ActiveSync Remote Display to show the PocketPC desktop on my Windows XP notebook.
To design and implement the application, you first build it in Delphi 2005 as a Windows Forms .NET application. Next you comment out a few property settings (in the form designer managed code section) for properties that are not implemented in CF. Then I used the upcoming Delphi CF technology preview command line compiler to re-compile the application and download it to the PocketPC device.
Pocket Caddy allows you to create golf courses and players and save them in XML files. You can then use the Pocket Caddy to keep track of the scores of players during the round. I wish I had time, when I was in the UK, to play on The Old Course at St. Andrews. Oh well, it’s better to spend more time with the developers here and elsewhere in Europe. There will always be time to play golf someday. Thank you, David Clegg and John Kaster for your help in letting me use Pocket Caddy.
Stay tuned to the Developer Network for general available of the technology preview compiler and information how you can use it with Delphi 2005.
David I - in Arnhem, Netherlands
{ 6 } Comments
Great stuff, it will be nice to get our hands on the preview
Hi David,
The Compact Framework Technology Preview command-line compiler looks really good. I can’t wait to get my hands on it and try it out myself! Delphi Rocks!
Groetjes, Bob Swart
Hi David,
This is all great stuff, and I have raised this before….
But what about Symbian?
Symbian is far and away the leader in the smart phone market.
I thought Borlands USP over Microsoft was to be platform agnostic, right now you are ignoring the clear mobile leader and backing Microsoft to take the market. ( I know there is a c++ version that targets symbian) but how about Delphi?
It would be great to have a Delphi solution that will allow us to use to be platform agnostic.
Q.) Will strong mobile brands e.g. Nokia give control of the platform to Microsoft?
Symbian support is really a lot of extra work for Borland. The compact framework is somewhat built upon the regular .NET framework which they have already invested in. Adding support for palm, symbian, and any other operating system would be a basic compiler rewrite and, unless this is REALLY strong demand, I don’t think it would be worth it for them. Working with Symbian is best with C++ since they don’t really have a framework of visual controls and it has a completely different API from anything that is on the desktop right now.
In addition, I believe that anything compiled for a particular Symbian platform must be recompiled for another Symbian platform.
Thanks David for the great news. Excited to see this new technology and how it will fit into the Delphi IDE at some point in the future.
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